s 
kimono a few years until he could buy them back again; but she never seemed able to find 
them-or at least, that was what she said. 

The Arashinos treated me with great kindness during the years I lived in their home. In the 
daytime, I worked with them sewing parachutes. At night I slept alongside their daughter and 
grandson on futons spread out on the floor of the workshop. We had so little charcoal, we 
burned compressed leaves for warmth-or newspapers and magazines; anything we could 
find. Of course food had grown still more scarce; you can't imagine some of the things we 
learned to eat, such as soybean dregs, usually given to livestock, and a hideous thing called 
-nukapan, made by frying rice bran in wheat flour. It looked like old, dried leather, though I'm 
sure leather would probably have tasted better. Very occasionally we had small quantities of 
potatoes, or sweet potatoes; dried whale meat; sausage made from seals; and sometimes 
sardines, which we Japanese had never regarded as anything more than fertilizer. I grew so 
thin during these years that no one would have recognized me on the streets of Gion. Some 
days the Arashinos' little grandson, Juntaro, cried from hunger-which is when Mr. Arashino 
usually decided to sell a kimono from his collection. This was what we Japanese called the 
"onion life"-peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while. One night in the spring of 
1944, after I'd been living with the Arashino family no more than three or four months, we 
witnessed our first air raid. The stars were so clear, we could see the silhouettes of the 
bombers as they droned overhead, and also the shooting stars-as they seemed to us-that 
flew up from the earth and exploded near them. We were afraid we would hear the horrible 
whistling noise and watch Kyoto burst into flames all around us; and if it had, our lives would 


have ended right then, whether we had died or not-because Kyoto is as delicate as a moth's 
wing; if it had been crushed, it could never have recovered as Osaka and Tokyo, and so 
many other cities, were able to do. But the bombers passed us over, not only that night but 
every night. Many evenings we watched the moon turn red from the fires in Osaka, and 
sometimes we saw ashes floating through the air like falling leaves-even there in Kyoto, fifty 
kilometers away. You can well imagine that I worried desperately about the Chairman and 
Nobu, whose company was based in Osaka, and who both had homes there as well as in 
Kyoto. I wondered too what would become of my sister, Satsu, wherever she was. I don't 
think I'd ever been consciously aware of it, but since the very week she'd run away, I'd 
carried a belief shrouded somewhere in the back of my mind that the courses of our lives 
would one day bring us together again. I thought perhaps she might send a letter to me in 
care of the Nitta okiya, or else come back to Kyoto looking for me. Then one afternoon while 
I was taking little Juntaro for a walk along the river, picking out stones from the edge of the 
water and throwing them back in, it occurred to me that Satsu never would come back to 
Kyoto to find me. Now that I was living an impoverished life myself, I could see that traveling 
to some far-off city for any reason at all was out of the question. And in any case, Satsu and I 
probably wouldn't recognize each other on the street even if she did come. As for my fantasy 
that she might write me a letter . . . well, I felt like a foolish girl again; had it really taken me 
all these years to understand that Satsu had no way of knowing the name of the Nitta okiya? 
She couldn't write me if she wanted to-unless she contacted Mr. Tanaka, and she would 
never do such a thing. While little Juntaro went on throwing stones into the river, I squatted 
beside him and trickled water onto my face with one hand, smiling at him all the while and 
pretending I'd done it to cool myself. My little ruse must have worked, because Juntaro 
seemed to have no idea that anything was the matter. 

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might 
otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that 
afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be. Mr. 
Arashino's daughter, for example, suffered the death of her husband during the war, and 
afterward poured herself into two things: caring for her little boy and sewing parachutes for 
the soldiers. She seemed to live for nothing else. When she grew thinner and thinner, you 
knew where every gram of her was going. By the war's end, she clutched at that child as 
though he were the cliff's edge that kept her from falling to the rocks below. 

Because I'd lived through adversity once before, what I learned about myself was like a 
reminder of something I'd once known but had nearly forgotten-namely, that beneath the 
elegant clothing, and the accomplished dancing, and the clever conversation, my life had no 
complexity at all, but was as simple as a stone falling toward the ground. My whole purpose 
in everything during the past ten years had been to win the affections of the Chairman. Day 
after day I watched the swift water of the Kamo River shallows rushing below the workshop; 
sometimes I threw a petal into it, or a piece of straw, knowing that it would be carried all the 
way to Osaka before washing out into the sea. I wondered if perhaps the Chairman, sitting at 
his desk, might look out his window one afternoon and see that petal or that straw and 
perhaps think of me. But soon I began to have a troubling thought. The Chairman might see 
it, perhaps, though I doubted he would; but even if he did, and he leaned back in his chair to 
think of the hundred things the petal might bring to mind, I might not be one of them. He had 
often been kind to me, it was true; but he was a kind man. He'd never shown the least sign of 
recognizing that I had once been the girl he'd comforted, or that I cared for-him, or thought of 
him. 

One day I came to a realization, more painful in some ways even than my sudden 
understanding that Satsu and I were unlikely to be reunited. I'd spent the previous night 
nursing a troubling thought, wondering for the first time what might happen if I reached the 
end of my life and still the Chairman had never taken any special notice of me. That next 
morning I looked carefully at my almanac in the hopes of finding some sign that my life 


wouldn't be lived without purpose. I was feeling so dejected that even Mr. Arashino seemed 
to recognize it, and sent me on an errand to purchase sewing needles at the dry goods store 
thirty minutes away. On my walk back, strolling along the roadside as the sun was setting, I 
was nearly run down by an army truck. It's the closest I've ever come to being killed. Only the 
next morning did I notice that my almanac had warned against travel in the direction of the 
Rat, precisely the direction in which the dry goods store lay; I'd been looking only for a sign 
about the Chairman, and hadn't noticed. From this experience I understood the danger of 
focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd 
spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable 
sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd 
been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away 
from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like 
a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give. 

The war ended for us in August of 1945. Most anyone who lived in Japan during this time will 
tell you that it was the very bleakest moment in a long night of darkness. Our country wasn't 
simply defeated, it was destroyed-and I don't mean by all the bombs, as horrible as those 
were. When your country has lost a war and an invading army pours in, you feel as though 
you yourself have been led to the execution ground to kneel, hands bound, and wait for the 
sword to fall. During a period of a year or more, I never once heard the sound of laughter-
unless it was little Juntaro, who didn't know any better. And when Juntaro laughed, his 
grandfather waved a hand to shush him. I've often observed that men and women who were 
young children during these years have a certain seriousness about them; there was too little 
laughter in their childhoods. 

By the spring of 1946, we'd all come to recognize that we would live through the ordeal of 
defeat. There were even those who believed Japan would one day be renewed. All the 
stories about invading American soldiers raping and killing us had turned out to be wrong; 
and in fact, we gradually came to realize that the Americans on the whole were remarkably 
kind. One day an entourage of them came riding through the area in their trucks. I stood 
watching them with the other women from the neighborhood. I'd learned during my years in 
Gion to regard myself as the inhabitant of a special world that separated me from other 
women; and in fact, I'd felt so separated all these years that I'd only rarely wondered how 
other women lived-even the wives of the men I'd entertained. Yet there I stood in a pair of 
torn work pants, with my stringy hair hanging along my back. I hadn't bathed in several days, 
for we had no fuel to heat the water more than a few times each week. To the eyes of the 
American soldiers who drove past, I looked no different 
from the women around me; and as I thought of it, who could say I was any different? If you 
no longer have leaves, or bark, or roots, can you go on calling yourself a tree? "I am a 
peasant," I said to myself, "and not a